Re: CJK problems

CJK in links2 is possible, but there are some problems with this at the moment:
fonts, encodings, and text terminal support for CJK will need some work. however
each of these can be addressed separately from the others, so there is a good
quick payoff for doing even one of these parts.

fonts (graphical links2): the current links2 font renderer is based on large
bitmaps which are scaled down for display. UTF-8 is supported, but you
will need to "roll-your-own" font, or hack the font renderer to do
truetype (or similar) at runtime. obviously large-sized bitmaps of the CJK
parts of Unicode are also a possibility, but expect a very large executable
footprint -- something between 80 MiB and 160 MiB seems likely for a font with
good coverage of CJK.

encodings: CJK encodings are not implemented in links2 right now, but please
feel free to add them as necessary. the current scheme is very much centered
on UTF-8 + a bunch of single-byte encodings, so adding double-byte might be
a bit complex -- right now the encoders/decoders are not prepared to be stateful,
except for the UTF-8 one, which is handled as a special case. however the internal
UTF-8 representation in links2 should work fine -- as of the most recent Unicode
standards, most or all of the CJK encodings can be round-tripped through Unicode
without data loss.

CJK text terminals (text terminal links2): there is no support for CJK text terminals
in links2 right now, nor is there support for UTF-8 text terminals (i have a patch
for some UTF-8 terminal support, but it won't work for CJK in its current form.)
actually adding support for double-byte encodings on text terminals is likely to
be much easier than adding proper support for UTF-8 on text terminals, since the
text terminal rendering engine makes several assumptions about bytecount always
being equal to visual width.

-ben

----- Original Message -----
From: Gong Xun <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 22:52:15 +0800
To: [email protected]
Subject: [links-list] CJK problems

Sorry, my mail(1) had a serious problem and maybe posted a bulk mail:(
I am from China and is a old(2 years) user of links. Today i found links
had moved to links.sf.net and I downloaded one 2.x tarball. The graphics
are great! But I found there is no CJK fonts in links(Yes, there IS a
socalled Japanese font, but it has no use logging on a Japanese Utf8
site:<lt>). (Oh not IS it's ARE)

I thought for CJK are just left-to-right languages and links DOES support
unfixed width fonts, so CJK is possible, isnt it?
<nl><nl>

-- 
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

_______________________________________________
Links-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/links-list